1 - Language within language

Summary

The language of the King James Bible (KJB) has not been lacking in admirers. From T. B. Macaulay (1828) onwards, praise has come thick and fast. For Richard Chenevix Trench, writing thirty years later,

all is clear, correct, lucid, happy, awaking continual admiration by the rhythmic beauty of the periods, the instinctive art with which the style rises and falls with the subject, the skilful surmounting of the difficulties the most real, the diligence with which almost all which was happiest in preceding translations has been retained and embodied in the present; the constant solemnity and seriousness which, by some nameless skill, is made to rest on all.

For George Saintsbury it (with Shakespeare) represents “the perfection of English, the complete expression of the literary capacities of the language” (1887). For others it is “a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast” (Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1916); “probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world” (H. L. Mencken, 1930), its style is “characterized not merely by homely vigour and pithiness of phrase, but also by a singular nobility of diction and by a rhythmic quality … unrivalled in its beauty (John Livingstone Lowes, 1936); in short, it is “a miracle and a landmark” (H. Wheeler Robinson, 1940).